1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods, systems and program products for singularly and uniquely identifying an individual within a given population.
2. Description of Related Art
There are millions of people in various populations around the world. For instance, the United States of America (“USA”) currently has more than 300 million living people in its population. Most, if not all, of USA's population have digital records that correspond to and can identify or partially identify each individual (i.e., person) within its population. These digital records can include, for instance, a person's first, last and middle name, address(es), date of birth, telephone number(s), social security account number (“SSN”), as well as other identifying data used within the USA or throughout other countries. In addition to the foregoing, death records are also digitally stored. To date there are over 80 million digitally stored death records in the USA alone. All of these digital records, of both living and deceased individuals, are stored in large-capacity public and private electronic databases for electronic search. The digital records of both those living and deceased within a population is referred to hereinafter as the “digitized population.” As such, there exists a plethora of digital records of the USA digitized population, with nearly 380 million or more digital records, that can be searched and data gathered from numerous public and private databases.
Often times there is a need to singularly identify a person within a population, to the exclusion of all others, within such population. For instance, a person may need to be identified and distinguished from others for purposes of financial approvals, fraud prevention, genealogical research, law enforcement, medical reasons, amongst various other purposes a person may need to be uniquely identified.
Current methods of uniquely identifying an individual from all others in a population exhibit many errors due to the commonality of first and last name pairings. For instance, in the USA a significantly large portion of its population share a first and last name combination with at least one or more individuals within such population both alive and or deceased. Of this name sharing population, a significant portion thereof also share the same exact birth date or even address, and the like, with one or more other individuals having the same first and last name pairing. The number of people within a population that share the same name, and potentially the same birth date or some other common factor, further increases when factors such as name changes due to marriage and divorce, nick names, misspellings, and people who use their middle name as their first name are taken into account.
To date, the most accurate approach for uniquely identifying an individual within a given digitized population is through the use of a Social Security Number (“SSN”). The prior art is replete with references disclosing tracking or locating individuals through digital records based on the use of a SSN at the beginning searching stage. A SSN is a unique marker that identifies individuals within a given population without duplication of any SSNs. However, a large portion of digitized records do not contain SSN's, or contain inaccurate SSN's, or any other wholly unique marker for singularly and uniquely identifying a person to the exclusion of all others. As stated above, these records may contain some information beyond a first and last name pairing. The problem is that absent the use of a SSN in initially searching for an individual, the prior art fails to address the need to accurately and singularly identify individuals within a digitized population when a unique identifier, such as a SSN, is not initially available.